Something that might bear repeating, if I am not mistaken, is that the more time you spend traveling the less and less haste is worth anything for a ret paladin; unless the sims and/or spreadsheets are taking that into account.
Even if we found out that Gurthalak was significantly affected by haste it would still have to really alter the weights in order for us to stop reforging away from it(on movement heavy fights at least, like about half of DS), would it not?

Looks like Blizzard was aware and fixed the issue a lot of us were having with the trinkets.

Again, yes and no. Assuming less Time on Target, Crit would NORMALLY prove superior, based on Exemplar's spreadsheet. Based on MY spreadsheet, it depends completely on RNG being RNG. I acknowledge that Exemplar tries to normalize RNG instances so it's easily calculable, but I prefer a more probability approach to modeling, which makes it more simple and complex at the same time.

The short answer, is there is no "right" answer. If you're looking to rank in the top 10, you use any advantage you can get, including favorable RNG, which would push you more towards how I model. If you've looking for week after week after week of doing your average best, you follow Exemplar's model. Neither is correct or inherently wrong. During WotLK, I agreed on much what was already posted, so I didn't bother to try to refute. However, RNG being RNG, and Cata pushing priority order mattering, even .03 secs mattering, we're getting results that are, in some cases, wildly different. Averaging out, I'd follow Exemplar, hands down. Pushing into the top 50, I'd try to take advantage of favorable RNG, and all the sacrifices that entails, being that you may not, probably not, hit favorable RNG.

Thank God. It was incredibly annoying being punished for being Horde, even though Horde is where Blizzard seems to love . Thank you EJ community for getting this looked at and fixed .

you can get a tentacle on Ultraxion but you have to be standing by the edge of the platform instead of standing back where the range/healers are. I tested it out on lfr last night and got it to proc.

on a side note consecration also doesn't work on Ultraxion even standing on the edge since he's "flying".

I've actually noticed the procs and the crits the most on fights like Warlord where we have a huge burn phase. While just doing attempts on 25m Heroic 2+ minute attempts each time the proc from the sword alone was doing well over 1 million in damage. It was enough for one of the raiders to say something to me about it. He was wondering if the tick for a ret was actually double dipping like the Sword from ICC (forget the name) once did before the nerf.

Since I'm actually on vacation till after the beginning of the year (and not raiding as of Tuesday) I've got no real way to actually test this out but it does somewhat make sense to me that it could be doing this while we are totally raid buffed. Regardless if that's the case or not the Sword is just insane on a Ret period but it is also insane for an Unholy DK as 2 of the DK's from my guild got the sword the same night I did and for Ultraxion and Warlord we just end up destroying the encounter O.o

Tests of Gurthalak provide consistent data. It is not double-dipping - it functions off of AP and gains nothing from SP. It's simply crazy powerful. Its procs average over 2k DPS, which is somewhat more than double what is granted by secondary stats on a more normal weapon. In non-average (the good side of the RNG) or on a gimmicked fight (bonus damage phases), it can be truly insane since it's producing this damage by relatively few high value hits.

Made an account to mention something I wasn't sure was being discussed or not.

Huntingbear mentioned that the crit ticks from Gurthalak nearly matched his melee crit%.

I can basically confirm that the ticks from the sword will scale with your overall crit% (and with buffs as well).

A fury war and myself picked it up last week, and on a night clearing out 6/8, the tentacle proc's overall crit% exactly mirrored our individual melee crit%'s (mine being around 15% and the fury wars at 26%).

So, the sword's proc scales with crit.

On a side note, an odd thing to mention and I can't pinpoint why, is I noticed a very large difference in how many procs I got compared to the fury war. I had assumed because the sword has no internal cd and a flat 2% proc rate (just what I've read at least), that it would be proc'ing far more for the fury war. This was NOT the case. As I almost doubled his overall ticks/procs.

I can't explain why, after a small bit of testing, the only thing I can imagine it would be is seal of command. Almost positive it doesn't proc off any "spells", consecration / holy wrath / censure ticks, I can't be sure about judgements as they proc seal of command hits. Maybe someone else can shed a bit of light on why it would be proc'ing far more for ret then a fury war?

It isn't 100% confirmed that it is Seals of Command that procs the weapon, as from previous posts the seal alone was causing the weapon to proc.

The time frame between a seal hitting (and procing SoC) and Gurthalak procing is so miniscule that we won't be able to pinpoint which ability procs it.

Perhaps the number of abilities that could proc the tentacle is balanced around the fact that a fury warrior can dualwield Gurthalak.
This is of course only speculation, but the result is that it lowers its value for furies overall. I also don't know if a tentacle that procs from an off-hand Gurthalak deals full damage or only 75% (50% offhand-dmg + 25%offhandspec), which would be another way of balancing it.
It could still be possible that the proc does too much damage on rets (and unholy) and get nerfed.

I do not think it scales with AP at all. I get the same tick damage naked with Gurthalak as I do in my full gear.

There seems to be a lot of misinformation/unsubstantiated claims being thrown around on Gurthalak in the last page or so. As Jonuts pointed out, the proc has never shown any sign of AP/SP scaling. Damage modifiers that will affect it include 3%/2% communion, CoE, avenging wrath, UH DK mastery, battle/berserker stance,boss mechanic global buffs/debuffs. Outside of that tick damage has remained constant.

My testing with seal of truth is about a page back now but in sum truth is procing the tentacle and not command. While specced out of command, it was still procing from truth hits. While it's hard to definitively rule out SoC as a source as well, data I've examined for 10k+ attacks suggest that SoC is not causing procs. If it was then the observed proc rates would be much lower than generally accepted. When only including the normal attacks + SoT hits the observed proc rate falls close to the accepted 2% value.

In regards to tentacle mind flay ticks of 150k-200k I'd need to see this in a parse to believe it. If you mean a single mind flay totals for 150k-200k damage then that would seem reasonable. I've looked through a number of top H domo parses and have yet to see a mind flay tick crit for over 50k, at least for ret paladins. I didn't bother looking at other specs as this is the ret forum. For the people referring to madness, the LFR dungeon journal is not accurate. When Deathwing starts to cast cataclysm he takes closer to 4x the damage in LFR. It's also hard to say what the other buffs are actually providing relative to their tooltips in LFR. Even through all of that the highest crit I could find for a ret paladin was 138k, with consistent 89k non crit ticks. There doesn't appear to be anything "broken" about it, it just appears that way when we have incorrect values for the modifiers in LFR.